Performance is relative and effective performance is very much determined by the use case i.e. we do analytics with couchdb its faster than a traditional RDBMS in many cases (especially if your views are queried regularly) on less hardware (disk space not included, but that's a trade off and compression in 1.2 helps greatly here) and is easier to use for document analysis. However it may not be a great fit for very high read use cases currently. If that's your use case then there are other options i.e. Redis (possibly as a front end to Couch) or dare I say it here Mongodb and Couchbase or numerous other commercial options from in-memory databases to column orientated databases, but again it depends on the use case.
You may want to describe your use case i.e. what you are trying to accomplish to allow the community to provide informed comment on your observations.
Thanks
Mike
-----Original Message-----
From: Attila Nagy [mailto:bra@fsn.hu]
Sent: 20 April 2012 08:35
To: user@couchdb.apache.org
Subject: Re: CouchDB slow response times
On 04/19/12 08:28, Attila Nagy wrote:
>
> So getting an exact document took .098921 seconds (nearly 98.9
> milliseconds) on a completely idle machine.
>
> Any subsequent queries are in the order of the above response time,
> which is just slow.
>
> Is this what CouchDB and Erlang capable of, or something is wrong in
> my setup? I haven't turned compression off, BTW, but will measure its
> effect.
Without compression:
07:43:03.822390 HTTP GET /test/1
07:43:03.823475 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
07:43:03.919761 the JSON data
so the response time is .097371 seconds (97.37 ms)
In the mean time, I've found that somewhere in time CouchDB/HTTPd turned
TCP NODELAY to off, so
socket_options = [{nodelay, true}]
gives: 2.47 ms response time, which is a major increase.
I could lower that down to 2.1 ms by switching to
null_authentication_handler, which is not good, but better.
On query performance: when I fetch the same documents (one by one, ID
number one to the last) from three different machines on four threads on
each of them (so 12 concurrent HTTP GETs can be on the wire), I can
saturate one CPU core (Xeon X5670 @ 2.93GHz, I've limited it to one
core) to 100% CouchDB and can get about 1700 query/sec performance.
These are just plain HTTP GETs, so no JSON parsing is involved.
Switching to persistent connections gives 2200 query/sec (again, CouchDB
maxes the CPU out).
I hope some day CouchDB will be able to deliver performance too.